Can death be useful? That’s the central question of the quickly expanding field of suspended animation, the process of slowing the body’s major processes as much as possible to induce a state that’s very much likedeath without actually causing the patient to die.

What precisely we mean when we say “actually die” is a bit of an open question these days; in a world where we can often be resuscitated after long periods of brain death, the noun “Death” is probably best defined as, “Any state of zero brain activity from which a person will never be revived.” That’s not particularly helpful, though; if a person is brain-dead next to a machine that could revive them, are they truly dead if the machine is broken and truly alive if it is not? Is death an absence of life, or an absence of any future potential for life?

Such questions used to be nothing but navel-gazing, but today represent concrete issues that could affect our lives in the every-day. With the recent onset of a trial for suspended animation technology, we have taken our first steps down a path with no end in sight. The trial will catch otherwise hopeless patients at the point of death (or potentially after), and swap out a large portion of their blood for a chilled, oxygenated saline solution. This quickly lowers the body to a chilly 10 degrees Celsius, which almost immediately induces a hypothermic state and lowers the metabolic rate to near zero. If cells aren’t doing anything then they also aren’t producing any of the metabolic products that normally build up to toxic levels without breathing and circulation. At this point, the question is not whether suspended animation is real but whether it’s medically useful.

Medical evacuation helicopters see a lot of death en-route to hospitals, but that could be about to change.

The field of suspended animation faced widespread skepticism for many years, but recent studies in pigs and a generally pro-futurism trend within science have led to a rather abrupt wave of professional acceptance. It mostly comes down to drastically reduced claims for the technology; rather than alienating everyday physicians and scientists with speculation about eternal life, suspended animation is now mostly about keeping terminal patients in a revivable state long enough to get them to machinery that can do the reviving. Many, many people die in ambulances, or military medevac helicopters, and these new attempts at “induced hibernation” could help those patients to get them the help they need.

Yet, there is simply no way we’ll stop there. The trend will begin at NASA, DARPA, Calico, and other moonshot research organizations: how do we put healthy people into a hibernative state? Getting astronauts to Mars is probably possible without suspended animation, but a trip to Europa or Enceladus will be much harder; there’s a reason that space-ships full of stasis pods are such a trope of science fiction, and not least of them is a crew’s demands on power and consumables. But space isn’t the only out-there application for suspended animation; not every prisoner at Guantanamo is an intelligence asset, so why keep useless prisoners conscious and complaining? And if you take the time to have an enemy combatant declared dead after combat, does that corpse still have rights if you revive it later?

Waking from suspended animation could be automated for long-term space missions with no conscious crew members.

Right now the research only really implies that suspended animation can be safe on the order of hours, but there’s every reason to believe that a stasis nap could safely last weeks or months, and years aren’t such a crazy idea either. We are about to start allowing people to pay to feel out the borders of death. People will “freeze” themselves even in absence of any plausible future cure for their fatal problem; if you can afford to do so, why wouldn’t you?

This technology will force us to ask tough questions about society: Does the word “death” mean something different for rich people than for the poor? Do we declare a patient as “dead” depending on whether they can afford to stay in stasis until some projected cure date? In this dystopia, a market crash could wipe out savings accounts and switch thousands of suspended patients from “Long Term Pre-Mortal Stasis” to “Med School Cadaver In Waiting.”

Minority Report had stasis prisons, albeit based on a different technology.

People in suspended animation will have cloudy and nonspecific rights, and may ask us to deal with some pretty heavy moral quandaries. I genuinely don’t know how I would deal with a situation in which poor families are saddled with insupportable fees to keep their loved ones in stasis — especially if a cure really could be near.

Then there’s financial inheritance. People will certainly be less inclined to leave savings to their children if they might one day wake up and need those funds again — would you trust your children to handle that money well? Pig studies have shown that suspended animation likely won’t affect memory or cognitive ability, so when you awaken after 5 years under, do you get to go back to your old job? Are your children still yours, or do they belong to the God-parent who took them in after your “fatal” car accident?

Our society is built on a foundation of certain reliable truths, but technology is increasingly calling those assumptions into question. We must begin to grapple with the effects that such low-level renovations will have, and we need to do it in forums less specialized than futurist think tanks and sci-fi discussion boards. The wider public needs to talk about these issues now, to decide how it feels about any possible future Terry Schiavo’s before it encounters them. Unfortunately, associations with science fiction make it impossible for many people to take the topic seriously, so that doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon — and in this case, soon is all the time we’ve got.